Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization. ERP systems may embrace finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, human resource management, and the like. ERP systems may be used to automate activities between these different resources within an integrated software application. One purpose may be to facilitate the flow of information between business functions across boundaries of an organization, and to manage the connections between outside stakeholders and internal resources.
Each resource with an ERP system may include many subsystems to manage various resources. For example, a finance/accounting application in an ERP system may be distributed among many different departments within an organization, and may be used to manage many different types of financial accounts. These different types of financial accounts may be managed using different products in the ERP system. Each of these products are typically specially tailored to handle one particular type of financial account. For example, an asset ledger may be used to track the accounting status of business assets. Although these different products are designed to handle specific accounts, each of them may be relevant when generating period end accounting statements, audit records and internal statistics.